


Anything

by Servena



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Bravery, Hope, Multi, Post Season 1, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-OT3, Scars, Steve's Pov, past trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-30
Updated: 2017-09-30
Packaged: 2019-02-04 09:36:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12768165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Servena/pseuds/Servena
Summary: “It makes me sad that it makes you sad.”





	Anything

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Sommerchallenge 2017.

Sometimes Steve would catch one of them looking at the scar on the inside of their right hand and see the expression on their face change. Nancy would trail off in the middle of a sentence, looking lost as she pressed her thumb into her palm. Jonathan’s carefully coaxed-out smile would vanish from his face in an instant.

In moments like these he felt left behind, reminded of the fact that Nancy and Jonathan had been planning to go monster hunting together before he had even known what was going on (or even that something was going on). They had come together in their need to find a person they cared about, while he had blundered in later and didn’t have any real stakes in the game.

Except he did, he had them. He had gone back into the house even though he had been scared to death, for them. For Nancy, who was the most beautiful and definitely most badass girl he had ever met. (He loved her more than he could have ever imagined loving somebody.) And for Jonathan who was a bit awkward sometimes but just as brave. (He didn’t really want to examine the warm feeling that spread through his chest every time he managed to make the other guy laugh with one of his stupid jokes.)

“It makes me sad that it makes you sad”, he said one evening as they were all sitting on the couch in his living room after the movie they’d been watching had ended. He had caught Nancy looking at her hand again, and this time he had taken it and was now running small circles over the scar with the tips of his fingers. He could feel Jonathan’s gaze on them from his place on Nancy’s other side.

But to his surprise, Nancy answered: “It doesn’t make me sad. Not always.”

Steve looked up. “It doesn’t?”

She shrugged lightly and turned her head to look at Jonathan as if for confirmation. “Of course sometimes I think of Barb and that maybe we could have saved her if we had just…And we didn’t even kill it in the end.”

A sad expression passed over her face, but before any of them could say something, it was replaced by something else and she continued: “But sometimes when I get really scared of something, like the thought of going to college or other stupid things”, she smiled a bit at that, “I touch it and I think, “I did that. We did that.” Steve watched as she reached out with her free hand to hold Jonathan’s right, touching the matching scar in his palm. Jonathan startled a bit, but didn’t pull away.

“And if I can fight a monster, maybe I can do anything.” She looked at them and smiled. “Right?”

“Right”, they said in unison.


End file.
